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Re:Resignation Letter by Benjammer on Tuesday July 14, 2020 @12:34PM (#23834085)
That just sounds like bluster and emotion to me though.

Why is truth not a process of collective discovery?

Is this implying that truth used to be this and now is not?

What exactly does "collective discovery" mean in the context of a newspaper?

What evidence is there that this used to be the case and now is not?

What is the new "orthodoxy"?

Are you able to describe this orthodoxy in specific terms and not just labels?

Who are these "enlightened few"?

What do you mean by "whose job it is"?

When have these "few" "informed everyone else", specifically?

I do not mean to imply there are no answers to these questions, or that the answers will fall one way or the other. I just fail to see why I should take those statements seriously as "a very key point" without a lot more explanation and evidence. She starts to explain a few things before these statements that sound interesting, but then immediately starts ranting about Twitter instead.

Re:Resignation Letter by mancerayder on Tuesday July 14, 2020 @01:44PM (#23835136)
I think it's pretty obvious what the new orthodoxy is, and she gave some examples of it. How many more questions do you want to ask? The NYT is condoning high school student canceling each other, hiding anti-Semitism from certain writers they like based on the obvious factors, making wild narratives about US history (like their Revolutionary War revisionism), and most importantly, unlike papers like the Financial Times which publish multiple competing views side by side (there are probably few FT readers here but it really is a highlight), they intimidate people who are centrists because they don't toe the line. Which line, you ask, what do you think?

We accuse Republicans of being anti science (they are, it's often true), but we publish op eds criticizing protests on the right as carriers of coronavirus while praising protests of another sort. Last week Krugman criticized red states (correctly) for opening up too soon, but he said absolutely nothing about the California spike.

So what do you want in a newspaper, facts or agitprop??

Re:Resignation Letter by cm2187 on Tuesday July 14, 2020 @03:03PM (#23836242)
I don't remember seeing a single pro-brexit op-ed in the FT. The FT isn't publishing competing views. It very much aligned itself to the NYT's "only the facts that fits the narrative" approach.
Re:Resignation Letter by mancerayder on Tuesday July 14, 2020 @09:19PM (#23840167)
Hm, I definitely remember a lot of anti-Brexit pieces, and I don't remember the balance overall so I'll take your word for it. Perhaps that's a sore point for the FT, which is fundamentally not 'right' or 'left' but more classical liberal / free-trade oriented. Investors care about these things, at least many do. The NYT, though, if you do a little experiment and go to the website right now, look at the headlines displayed. The headlines alone are editorialized, but there are interpretations being done for you if you delve into the articles themselves, versus rational arguments being put forth. A paper I read daily and which I sometimes post here, Bloomberg, started doing this in a section called "CityLab". And today was an Opinions piece saying that Cancel Culture is a joke, doesn't exist and is proof of privilege that it was even mentioned.

The FT I've seen opinion pieces on completely opposite views side by side or issue to issue. Sometimes something would respond days later to something posted before, in a rebuttal. True both in the editorials and in the Letters section. Dear Sirs...

Re:Resignation Letter by MagnumOpus on Wednesday July 15, 2020 @05:53AM (#23843121)
There are also no pro-pollution op-eds, or anti-vaccine op-ends in the FT, because they hold themselves to a standard of not publishing "he-said-she-said" fair-and-balanced views, but to give some insight into which of the two sides of an argument seems to have evidence on its side. Brexiters didn't (and don't) have the facts or watertight arguments on theirs side, especially economically speaking.
Re:Resignation Letter by cm2187 on Wednesday July 15, 2020 @06:53AM (#23843498)
“The facts are all on my side”, “anyone who disagree with me has either evil motives or is an idiot”, etc... is the sort of illiberal approach to political discourse which is exactly what triggered the resignation letter.
Re:Resignation Letter by esja on Wednesday July 15, 2020 @11:40AM (#23846812)
I've subscribed to the FT for over a decade and I think you are giving them way too much credit here. They took a very clear anti-Brexit stance and that coloured their publishing. They have done the same with Trump to a frankly embarrassing degree.
Re:Resignation Letter by jkingsbery on Tuesday July 14, 2020 @12:53PM (#23834398)
> What exactly does "collective discovery" mean in the context of a newspaper?

National Review will often have a chain of columns between two of its writers going back and forth debating the merits of a particular position. That is what collective discovery should look like - a publication should encourage views that the editors might disagree with in order to understand the different perspectives on a topic.

Now, it's all about people "canceling" each other.

> What is the new "orthodoxy"?

I thought this was made pretty clear - the new orthodoxy is the Progressive Left way of thinking. Given that a term is a label, I'm not sure what would clear it up, but she does give examples of things that went against the orthodoxy (Tom Cotton's op-ed), and what it consists of (in the paragraph starting "All this bodes ill, especially for independent-minded young writers and editors paying close attention to what they’ll have to do to advance in their careers...").

>

Re:Resignation Letter by Benjammer on Tuesday July 14, 2020 @01:04PM (#23834586)
I mostly intended these questions rhetorically, or directed at Bari herself, as opposed to really wanting another HN commenter to go down the line and "respond" to each one. I don't know how productive that is going to be on this forum.
Re:Resignation Letter by mancerayder on Tuesday July 14, 2020 @01:46PM (#23835159)
It was a letter, not a book long argument. But she did give examples to answer almost all of your questions.
Re:Resignation Letter by jkingsbery on Wednesday July 15, 2020 @12:45AM (#23841421)
I don't expect Bari Weiss lurks on HN, but fortunately the questions you asked were already mostly answered by her in her resignation letter.
Re:Resignation Letter by Spooky23 on Tuesday July 14, 2020 @02:01PM (#23835368)
End of the day, the letter is a provocative piece written by a provocateur. It's hard to be a provocateur in a large enterprise that explicitly self-identifies as the paper of record and an institution.

I don't follow this writer, but based on open letter (and the fact that the individual published an open resignation letter in itself), the individual sounds like someone who didn't function well in a work environment full of big egos. It's hard to swim upstream in that type of org.